


Else Close the Wall Up

by ParadoxR



Series: Unto the Breach, Dear Friends [3]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Implied Relationships, Loss, Military, Reflection, Reminiscing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-02
Updated: 2014-06-02
Packaged: 2018-02-03 02:20:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1727558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ParadoxR/pseuds/ParadoxR
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This stand-alone is nominated for the 2014 Sam and Jack Multimedia Awards.</p><p>A troubled Sam-POV reflection, memorializing what it means to be an SG and dealing with Fifth's mind rape.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Whose Blood is Fet

A/N: AFAM = AF Achievement Medal. MAJOR SPOILER: Heroes. Yes, that part. Also some "Lost City", where Sam worked after "Threads", and either "Unnatural Selection" or "New Order". A few other pre-Heroes cameos, but they blend in with beyond-canon if you don't know better.

 

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our English dead! - _Henry V_

__

* * *

 

_Sam's eyes press together, squeezing on the memories of too many wounded in too long a war. Whether in order to keep them in or out, she wasn’t sure._

They flash before her, every SG team member, much of the SGC directly, a good number of too-green space pilots—to whom she owes her life and vice versa. Even in the Freeze alone, so many who’d stayed in the sky for them: who’d held the flanks, frozen, burning, dying, but never yielding …who’d trusted them, who’d put everything into her and the General and Daniel and Teal’c, against all realities. Trusted them handle all of what they must with only what they had …whose selfless and regularly batshit sacrifices didn’t earn them so much as a commendation. Because they weren’t the ones the powers that be were watching. Her head bows, anger at DC over mixing with sadness for the dead. _Soldiers sleeping in the snow, some of them forever._

Everyone at the SGC knows the heroes among them rarely get the recognition they deserve, particularly with Kinsey’s caucus portraying them as the bastard, flightless, overspending stepchild. She remembered every one of them all too well. Every recommendation, every denial, every overridden approval, every fight. Flying back to lead young airmen through another too-long shift on another too-long night. To talk them through abasement by their peers for spending years in deep space radar telemetry without a single campaign medal or commendation to show for it. Damnit, it had taken her commanding the SGC through a foothold situation as an captain to scare up an Achievement Medal for anyone in here. Suicidally rigging two Jaffa-teeming Ha’taks to blow while on board and orbiting Earth was the standard for  _one Air Medal_.

  
Yes, comforting a grieving widow who’d never know she’s missing a posthumous Silver Star or Service Cross had been a painfully familiar experience for all too many years. Still, they pull through it together, everyone who stands guard at and through the Gate day in and day out. They manage to console lieutenants who’d never see nor hear again, who’d watched their wingmen burn to death to save them… without the benefit of even Purple Hearts or POW Medals. They organize birthday parties for kids who’d never know the heroes their mothers were or the Medal of Honor or Distinguished Flying Cross they should have been buried with. They hold Dining Outs when half a room of POW/MIA Tables couldn't have seated all their missing. They rely on each other to know their merits and their minds without the aid of long-overdue unit commendations and achievement medals.  
  
Sam squeezes on the tears. She’s driven distraught wives to Peterson, neither of them knowing that a then-stable husband would never see the sun again. She’s sung children to sleep as their father stares at his wife’s vitals ticking away on Earth-tech monitors. She’s watched her own friends, her family, the love of her life die, voluntarily laying down their lives in the most long-suffering and painful ways imaginable—to say nothing of her own deaths and tortures. She’s fought mind rape and otherwise, drugs and beatings to break ungrateful strangers out of prisons, only to be shoved back through the Gate and into another catastrophe. Nose to the grind. And she, especially she, hazard of the gender, has talked too-young spouses through broken friendships and broken families, talked too-young officers though shunned alliances and churlish refugees.  _Do the impossible, for the ungrateful. Repeat._  She’d guided new SG combat engineers through their first block leave, unable to readjust to the Earth night sky devoid of rocket fire and burning flesh.  
  
Every junior NCO she has here knows the SGC is held to a higher standard—unfairly, yes, but they’re proud of it. They strive for it, shine for it. She’s proud of them, every day. A tear hits her desk. Not for the first time, she struggles with how to explain a Medal of Honor to the two men in the infirmary, who both broken cover and lost limbs to save allies that even their symbiotes hadn’t been able to revive. Or to the doctor and lieutenant now benched in the research unit, but not dead, because their CO threw himself on that grenade.  
  
Her personal wounds tug at her, and her thoughts drift to Janet, and to Cassie who's likely still asleep in her guest room… The daughter of a hero who’d stayed by a young man’s side—dozens of young heroes sides—knowing she was compromised…not even for an arguably utilitarian goal, but to save one life. A hero who’d stayed and died because she believed that a unit lived and died by the devotion we have for one another. That others may live. Never leave behind.  _De oppresso liber._  Don’t ever stop. Don’t ever, ever, ever, stop. Sam nurses her head, unconsciously massaging her right leg.

  
  
“I’m sorry, Janet.”  
  
But she’d watched too many great men and women live and die for this cause, burning away in ever-more voluntarily painful and overwhelming ways. Their scars and her own still keep her up nights, and keep her comforting others.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Soldiers sleeping in the snow: Men were sleeping on the sand, some of them sleeping forever. -Ernie Pyle, D-Day Dispatch
> 
> Medals: It's true, Sam and Jack don't have Purple Hearts or POW Medals, and neither didn't earned a unit citation or a valor decoration, or even a combat identifier, on SG-1 as of "New Order"—if you ever wonder at Sam's ribbon rack.
> 
> On, on, you noblest English, whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof... -Henry V


	2. Lend the Eye

Non-miliary (non-AF, really) folks may want to pre-read this chapter's endnote glossary.

* * *

_But she’d watched too many great men and women live and die for this cause, burning away in ever-more voluntarily painful and overwhelming ways. Their scars and her own still keep her up nights, and keep her comforting others._

 

…  ~~Jack~~   _General O’Neill_  dying, dissolving away under another Ancient download, ever-pushing and ever-searching for a miracle, even as the Entity and Jolinar and Sokar and Fifth—and Fifth—and every other one crush against her own skull. Watching Daniel and her father end their lives for a future none of them could guarantee. Spending never long enough searing through her memories and those that aren’t for some sort of lead to victory.

Fifth creeps back to her, a flicker of Jolinar, a flash of Charlie O’Neill, of something of her own she should have reported … a hint of something Teal’c still beats himself about. She stands, moving to a notepad and managing to scribble a few runes that had floated into her head, familiar for the third time in as many months. Whether from a no-call first contact six years ago, a poem Lantash wrote, a scrap of Replicator code, or someone else’s grammar school project, she couldn’t decipher through the fog.  _Find Daniel._  She jerks.  _Find. Daniel._

 

Sam hangs up the video call, reassured that it looked like “Alkasian.”  _Are you ever going to get used to remembering things you never knew?_  She Sighs. At least Daniel was…Daniel about the new clue. They'd be on that for days, now. She knows they both love it, but her laugh comes out as a choke anyway.

It’s easy to lose track at their operations tempo, to forget until the holidays or a post-speech conference mixer that some people know about their local elections, engage with their neighbors, or have heard a movie or hit song from the last three years via anything besides their adoptive daughter’s boom box.  _Do they still call them that?_  She’s lucky eight years of first contacts have honed her cold call technique, because she often doesn’t even know what the weather’s been like all week.

It’s paid off, of course. For her, it’s been two early promotions, all the way to SG CO and deputy group commander. Notwithstanding being years early for General O’Neill’s old 2IC role, she’d also been overdue for the  _Prometheus_ and 51 posts and was in the running if Dixon didn’t return to Alpha. Like Al and Lou, she’d come out of her squadron command well above most of her peers. Most people not fighting a galactic war out of a 20-level missile silo. Of course, that did nothing for Earthside breadth; maintaining all alliances and following leads their allies would only trust SG-1 _-boom or bust-_ means she's basically just a stopgap commander.

She’s always envied the Area 51ers for that in a way, researchers and aircrews alike. To be distant from them by only some 1300 klicks, yet universes away. She closes her eyes and wonders what it would have been like to work there, training and building for a reckoning that could well come, but without ever seeing the Gate. Without ever having the thud of a body hitting a hot Iris crush against your heart, or ever watching good men die through a compromised wormhole. Without ever digging endlessly in the rubble of a city a thousand lifetimes from home, straining for the faintest hint of a battered DHD or a buried woman’s breath. Without ever sneaking through or blowing through an alien perimeter on an endless quest to near leave behind. Without ever reprogramming a mine, on a ship, in a firefight. Without ever staring into a foreign night sky or through a high glass ceiling, wondering where you are …or who you are. Without ever KOing a Jaffa that had just assaulted her in the worst way imaginable, only to watch him repent and join the Free Nation years later. Without ever outmaneuvering a Super Soldier, and then reliving it a thousand times so others could learn, too. Without ever talking an overzealous king, speaking something 1,000 years removed from Metropolitan French, into releasing your best friend before he bled to death. Without ever dragging a fallen airman through the frozen wilderness of an unknown planet, listening to the sound of your captors gaining ground and guessing blindly at the direction of a Gate. Without ever watching an event horizon envelop the honored dead.

 

No, she sighs, she can’t imagine. She doubts any of them could.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Early promotions: Actually, Sam's both granted early rank pin-on courtesy of the President and Vice AF Chief of Staff, *and* selected 1-2 years early by the central, blind promotion board. The latter maxes at 10%, but you can almost always count the frocked AF officers on one hand if you don’t have fingers.  
> SGC 2IC: This is hairy in canon until s10, but I presume the President Section 749'd her when she early Lt Col, probably because Jack wouldn't take Hammond's job without it.


End file.
